Mailing list vs. real person name in debian/changelog entries

[Rafael Laboissiere <rafael@debian.org>]

I am moving from debian-devel to debian-policy a discussion that started in
this bug report:

    http://bugs.debian.org/340428
    
and continued in the thread:

   http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/11/msg01378.html

I hope it is appropriate to post this here in debian-policy.  My
apologies if not.

The issue regards section 4.4 of the Policy.  Some projects being
maintained collectively at Alioth are using the name of a mailing list in
the trailer line of debian/changelog entries.  Although I think it is
legitimate to do so, some people argue that this yields wrong Changed-By
field in the changes file for binary NMU done by autobuilders.  Some even
think that using a mailing list as the maintainer in the changelog entry
is a Policy violation.

I do not care doing one way or the other, but since we did not reach
consensus in debian-devel, I would like to know the opinion of the Policy
people.

-- 
Rafael